Supporting early-stage entrepreneurs seems to be suddenly in vogue in Europe. Back in March, podcaster and venture investor Harry Stebbings launched “Project Europe” to great fanfare, aiming to back founders aged 25 and under with a small $10 million fund — riffing on the ‘Peter Thiel Fellowship’ model of yore. Now, a new fund hopes to go one better, this time with $68 million.
EWOR (short for “entrepreneurship without risk”) has launched its own “founder fellowship,” committing €60 million. The fund will offer selected founders €500,000 in capital for a 7% stake (in comparison, Project Europe offers €200,000 for a 6.66% stake). EWOR claims that, on average, its alumni have gone on to raise €1 million to €11 million during the fellowship.
Each year, the money will go to 35 entrepreneurs who fit EWOR’s mould of “visionaries, technical prodigies, deeply driven operators, and serial entrepreneurs.” Fellows will get virtual-first support, with 1:1 mentorship (including 1 to 5 hours per week with a “unicorn founder”), access to 2,000 mentors, VCs, and subject matter experts. The €500,000 investment would comprise €110,000 from EWOR GmbH and an additional €390,000 from the investment fund via an uncapped convertible note or similar instrument.
Founded in 2021, EWOR is run by six entrepreneurs — Daniel Dippold, Alexander Grots, Florian Huber, Petter Made, Quinten Selhorst, and Paul Müller. They previously worked at companies like SumUp, Adjust, ProGlove and United-Domains.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Dippold contrasted EWOR’s fellowship offering with Project Europe, saying while the latter touted backing entrepreneurs with “just an idea,” EWOR could easily match that offering. “We do two fellowships: ideation and traction. You can literally — like we had a year ago with the youngest machine learning researcher from Cambridge — have no co-founder, no idea. You can start at inception, no problem.”
“We run EWOR like a software company — build, measure, learn […] The only thing that matters is it needs to be the most useful thing any founder can possibly do,” he added.
Ten founders have so far been accepted into this year’s cohort. One of these is U.K.-based Mark Golab, a 3D printing specialist applying the technology to organ transplants with Cambridge Surgical Models, after surviving a life-threatening infection himself. Another is Vienna-based Viktoria Izdebezka, who is working on lead generation with Salesy.
Previous EWOR fellows include Ricky Knox, who achieved two nine-figure exits with Azimo and Tandem Bank; and Tim Seithe, who bootstrapped and led Tillhub to an exit worth almost €100 million.
Topics
early stage funding, Europe, EWOR, fellowship, Venture
Mike Butcher
Editor At Large
Mike Butcher (M.B.E.) is Editor-at-large of TechCrunch. He has written for UK national newspapers and magazines and been named one of the most influential people in European technology by Wired UK. He has spoken at the World Economic Forum, Web Summit, and DLD. He has interviewed Tony Blair, Dmitry Medvedev, Kevin Spacey, Lily Cole, Pavel Durov, Jimmy Wales, and many other tech leaders and celebrities. Mike is a regular broadcaster, appearing on BBC News, Sky News, CNBC, Channel 4, Al Jazeera and Bloomberg. He has also advised UK Prime Ministers and the Mayor of London on tech startup policy, as well as being a judge on The Apprentice UK. GQ magazine named him one of the 100 Most Connected Men in the UK. He is the co-founder of TheEuropas.com (Top 100 listing of European startups); and the non-profits Techfugees.com, TechVets.co, and Startup Coalition. He was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in 2016 for services to the UK technology industry and journalism.
View Bio
Most Popular
Alibaba unveils Qwen3, a family of ‘hybrid’ AI reasoning models
Kyle Wiggers
Hugging Face releases a 3D-printed robotic arm starting at $100
Kyle Wiggers
OpenAI upgrades ChatGPT search with shopping features
Maxwell Zeff
Meet the companies racing to build quantum chips
Anna Heim
From coding tests to billion-dollar startups, Ali Partovi’s eight-year experiment is paying off
Connie Loizos
Bezos-backed Slate Auto debuts analog EV pickup truck that is decidedly anti-Tesla
Sean O'Kane
Wait, how did a decentralized service like Bluesky go down?
Sarah Perez
Yelp debuts AI voice agents for restaurants and service providers
Here’s how to watch LlamaCon, Meta’s first AI developer event
Amazon launches its first satellites to rival Starlink